‘Managing outrage’ over intensive livestock developments: challenges for rural planning in the UK by Alison Caffyn

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Society’s increasing demand for cheap chicken has led to concentrations of intensive poultry units in certain parts of the UK. This research has followed the escalating contestations around proliferating livestock units and their impacts on local communities and environments in Herefordshire and Shropshire. The farming sector frame the developments as modern, efficient farming; producing affordable, traceable, healthy protein, and frame objectors as NIMBY incomers to the countryside.

Objectors are outraged by the ways the planning process focuses on evidence generated through black-box models which invariably prove acceptable levels of pollution, while marginalising them and their concerns. Alison will present results from her research which has explored constructions of knowledge within the planning process and how a ‘new public’ of local campaign groups has mobilised. She traces how controversy and challenge are drawing attention to the cumulative impacts of decades of intensive agriculture and are beginning to call democratic institutions and processes to account.